Google Exec Tells Jobs What ‘Open’ Is

A war of words between Google and Apple continued last night, shortly after Apple CEO Steve Jobs publicly criticized Google’s mobile-device operating system, Android, which competes with Apple’s own software for the iPhone and iPad.

Bloomberg

Andy Rubin

Jobs said Android was problematic because customers and app developers had to deal with a “mess” of numerous versions of the open-source software, which Google gives away for free to handset makers. He also said Google executives were “disingenuous” for calling Apple’s IOS operating system “closed.”

“Google loves to characterize Android as open and iOS and iPhone as closed,” he said during Apple’s third quarter earnings call. But that’s a “smokescreen to hide the real issue of what is best for the customer–integrated versus fragmented.”

After the comments, Google executive Andy Rubin, founder of Android, took to Twitter for the first time to defend Android in a hyper-compressed retort that only a geek could love, or understand: “the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’”

Coding skills here are rusty, but PC Mag deciphers Rubin’s tweet as listing the commands needed to start creating a copy of Android on a computer running the Linux operating system. “He’s stressing that anyone can develop for, hack, or even create their own version of Android. The same can probably not be said for Apple,” PC Mag wrote.

Meanwhile, a developer caught up in the crossfire also commented. Jobs cited the example of TweetDeck, a program used by people to access Twitter, to argue that Android fragmentation is a problem for app developers. After TweetDeck released its Android app recently, “they reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers with a daunting challenge,” Jobs said.

But Iain Dodsworth, CEO of TweetDeck, also took to Twitter last night to defend Android. “Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t,” he wrote.

Later Dodsworth added, “We only have 2 guys developing on Android TweetDeck so that shows how small an issue fragmentation is.”